A Stroke of Midnight

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I tried the thought that my sweet, gentle Galen would be in someone else’s arms, and the thought did not fill me with regret. In fact, it filled me with a certain peace to know that somewhere out there the ring would find him someone so that he would not mourn me.

  I smiled.

  “Why do you smile?” Doyle asked.

  “Because the thought does not hurt.” I went to them, and touched fingertips to both their faces. “The thought of losing the two of you . . . that is like a wound through my heart.” I cupped their cheeks but was careful not to touch Frost’s face with the ring. I wanted to touch them without the magic interfering. Doyle’s skin was actually warmer than normal for humans, had been since the night he’d rediscovered he could shapeshift into animal form. Frost’s skin was a little cooler than normal for humans. It wasn’t always so, but often he felt cool to the touch. I’d first noticed it in Los Angeles after he, too, had found some of his godhead through the chalice’s power.

  I held them, hot and cold, light and dark, and wondered if there truly was a man in faerie who would make me forget them, and turn love-blinded eyes to someone else. I valued this love that we had built slowly over weeks and months. It had taken effort and trust, and I knew that even if all the magic in the world died, I would still love them. And after what they had shown me tonight, I thought they would still love me as well.

  I moved their faces until they touched, so I could lay a kiss half on one and half on the other. I bent over them with my face between theirs. I whispered the truth against the silk of Frost’s hair, and the warmth of Doyle’s skin. “To have you in my bed for the rest of my life, I would give up faerie, the throne, all that I am, or all that I might be.”

  Doyle’s arm found me first, but Frost followed, and they pulled me to my knees, enveloped me against their bodies, pressed me hard and safe against them. Doyle spoke with his face pressed to the top of my head. “If there were anyone else worthy of the throne, I would let you.” He laid his cheek against my hair. His grip was almost painful in its fierceness. “For the scent of your hair on my pillow I would trade my life, but I have served this court too long to give it into the hands of Cel.”

  Frost’s hands trailed down my body, idly tracing the edge of my hip under the pants I’d put on. “The stories the prince’s guards have told . . .” He shivered, hands convulsing against my body.

  I pushed away enough to see their faces. “I thought the guards were too terrified of Cel to tattle on him.”

  Doyle pulled me in against them again, but turned me so that I half sat and half lay against their laps. “Some of the prince’s guard have access to human newspapers and magazines,” Doyle said. “They have noticed that your guards seem to be having a much better time than either the Queen’s Ravens or the Prince’s Cranes.”

  “I still can’t get used to hearing them called Cranes. That was my father’s bird, his guard.”

  “Many of them belonged to Essus’s guard,” Frost said. He held my hand in his. “They were simply given to Cel after Essus’s death.”

  “Were they given a choice?” I asked. At the time, the least of my worries had been my father’s guard, for had they not failed him? Had they not allowed him to be killed? Now I wondered how many of them would have dropped their vows as royal guard if they’d been given a chance.

  Doyle cupped the side of my face, brought my attention to his face. “It was your sending for the other men last night that has sent some of Cel’s birds to speak to us about life under him.”

  “Why did that loosen their tongues?”

  “It showed that you cared for all your guard, not just the ones you like. Such caring is not something the Cranes have seen in many a year.”

  I could feel Frost’s body shudder against mine. “I thought what we endured by the queen’s hand was bad enough . . .” He shook his head. “Such stories.”

  “We cannot give the court over to him, Meredith,” Doyle said. “I believe him truly mad.”

  “Being imprisoned and tortured isn’t going to improve that,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Tell her the rest,” Frost said.

  Doyle sighed. “You remember that the queen allowed Cel’s need to be slacked by one of his guards.”

  I nodded. “Yes, and that night there was an attempt on both my life and the queen’s.”

  “Yes, but we are still not absolutely certain Cel ordered it. It could simply have been those loyal to him moving in desperation to rescue him before he goes so mad that everyone sees him for what he is.”

  “You think the nobles would refuse to follow him?”

  “If he tried to do to the court what he has done to his guard, yes,” Doyle said.

  I settled back in the curves of their bodies, fur and leather. “What has he done?”

  “No, Meredith,” Doyle said, “perhaps later when we have the luxury of time and hours to go before we would sleep. None of it is comforting bedtime stories.”

  “We have a murder investigation; trust me, we won’t see sleep for hours,” I said.

  “What you need to know,” Doyle said, “is that he has fixated on you.”

  “Fixated how?” I asked.

  They exchanged another look. Doyle shook his head. But Frost said, “She needs to know, Doyle.”

  “Then tell her. Why must I always be the bearer of such news?”

  Frost blinked at him, and fought not to show on his face what he and I were thinking. We hadn’t known that bringing bad news bothered Doyle. He had been the Queen’s Darkness, and the Darkness could speak hideous truth and be unmoved, or so it had seemed. It was as if the one outburst had stripped Doyle of some part of himself.

  Frost said, “As you will then.” He looked down at me. “He called one of the women guards by your name and swore that if his mother is so determined to have you with child, it will be his seed in your body.”

  I looked into that handsome face, and wanted to ask if he were joking, but I knew he was not. It was my turn to shudder. “I would rather die.”

  “I’m not certain he would care,” Doyle said softly.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “One of the lesser fey died during one of Cel’s rapes.” Doyle sighed again, and a look came into his eyes I hadn’t seen often—fear. “He liked that she died during the sex. He continued to rape her corpse until her body became quite decayed.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face.

  “Or so his guard say,” Frost said.

  “You saw their eyes, do you truly believe they lied?”

  Frost let his breath out in a long sigh, and shook his head. “No.” He bent over me, hugging me, burying me beneath a spill of silver hair. “I am sorry, Meredith, but we felt you needed to know.”

  “I was afraid of Cel before,” I said.

  “Be more afraid now,” Doyle said. “Someone like that cannot be handed the keys to the Unseelie Court, especially now that power seems to be returning to us. With power, we are more dangerous. Too dangerous to be given over to a madman.”

  “Power returns because of Meredith,” Frost said.

  “Yes, but once power is reborn in the sidhe, it will be like a gun. It will not care how it is used.”

  “The Goddess may abandon us forever if the power is misused,” I said.

  “I thought as much, but think of the damage we could do before she took back her new gifts.”

  We sat on the floor and contemplated new possibilities for even larger disasters. Doyle hugged me tight, then stood up, and shook himself like a dog. He settled the leather coat around his tall frame, and said, “I thought to keep the news of Cel and his new madness until after we had brought the police inside, but . . .” He slid the dark glasses over his eyes, so that he was the tall, dark, inscrutable Darkness. Only the silver shine of his earrings gave him color. “We will escort you to the police and the FBI. I am sorry for losing control as I did, Princess, and for delaying us further.”

  I
let Frost help me to my feet. “One fit in over a thousand years, I think you’re overdue.”

  Doyle shook his head. “It is my fault that Rhys and the police are waiting in the cold. Inexcusable.”

  I touched his arm, but it was hard muscle encased in leather, as if he could not allow himself any softness. “I don’t think it’s inexcusable.”

  “If she comforts us again, we will be even later,” Frost said.

  Doyle smiled, a quick flash of teeth. “It is nice to be comforted instead of punished.” He held up the fur cloak. “Please, just for now. We will find something else more to your liking, but just for now.”

  I still didn’t like the idea of wearing the cloak, but after what I’d just heard about Cel and his guard, it seemed a lesser evil. I allowed him to put the cloak around me. “How does it look?” I asked.

  The wall quivered like a horse’s skin when a fly lands. Doyle shoved me behind him. Frost already had his sword naked in his hand. Doyle aimed a gun at the rock wall.

  A full length mirror surrounded by a gilt frame floated up through the stone, shining in the darkness of the room.

  I peered at it around Doyle’s body, my pulse in my throat. “Where did that come from?”

  Doyle still had a gun pointed very steadily at the bright surface. “I do not know.” Almost all the fey could use mirrors to make a sort of phone call. Doyle and some of the other sidhe could travel through mirrors. We stood waiting for a figure to appear, for something terrible to happen. But the mirror just hung on the wall, as if someone had put it there to be a mirror and nothing more.

  The tip of Frost’s sword lowered.

  Doyle glanced at us. “Why did it appear? Who sent it?”

  Frost stepped closer to the mirror. “Meredith, look at yourself in the mirror.”

  Doyle looked skeptical but he moved so I could see myself. The red and gold of the fur went well with my hair and skin, and brought out the gold in my eyes. With the hood up, I looked delicate and a little ethereal, like something between a Victorian Christmas card and a barbarian princess. Well, a small barbarian princess.

  “Now, thank the sithen for the use of the mirror, and say you no longer need it.”

  I frowned at him, but did as he suggested. “Thank you for the mirror, sithen. I do not need it right now.”

  The mirror stayed on the wall, as if it had always been there.

  “Please, sithen, a mirror could be used to harm her, please take it away,” Frost said.

  It felt as if the very air shrugged, then the wall quivered again, and the mirror began to sink back into the wall. When the wall was empty stone once more I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  “Are you saying the mirror appeared because I asked how I looked?”

  “Hush,” Frost said, then he nodded.

  “Now that,” Doyle said, “is interesting.”

  “The sithen hasn’t answered to whims since—” Frost stopped as if trying to think how long.

  “Long enough, my friend, that I, too, am not certain when the last time was.”

  “So is this good,” I said, “or not?”

  “Good,” Doyle said.

  “But dangerous,” Frost added.

  Doyle nodded. “I would be careful what I said aloud from now on, Meredith. An idle comment could have grave consequences, if the sithen has truly returned to that much life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The sithen is a living thing, but it does not think like any living thing I have ever known. It will interpret what you say in its own way. You ask how you look, and it gives you a mirror. Who knows what it might offer you, depending on what you said.”

  “What if I yelled for help, would it do anything useful?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Doyle said. “I have heard of it giving you objects you asked for, but never touching people. But there are enchanted items locked within its walls, things that simply vanished. Some theorize that they did not go back to the gods, but inside the very walls. There are things that I would not want appearing before you without more help than this.”

  “More help than you and Frost?”

  He nodded.

  I started to ask what object could possibly be so dangerous that the Killing Frost and the Queen’s Darkness could not keep me safe, but I didn’t. One disaster at a time. It was almost as if something wanted to keep us here tonight, distracted by one semi-important event after another. I shook my head. “Enough, we are leaving now. Rhys and the police are waiting.”

  When we stepped out the door we were in the main corridor just inside the outer doors. My room should have been three levels down, and nowhere near this area. The guards waiting to accompany us were staring at us as we walked out.

  Galen said, “That door wasn’t there before.”

  “No,” Doyle said, and he got everyone in formation, with me in the center, hidden once again behind a phalanx of guards. I would have said men, but at least three of them were female, including Biddy. She and Nicca would probably be useless in a fight. They were still too magic befuddled, but we were afraid to leave them behind. I was almost certain that without someone to stop them, they would have sex, and until I cleared it with the queen that was an automatic death by torture for both of them. Doyle did make them stop holding hands. He thought the police might get the wrong idea.

  Cathbodua and Dogmaela had joined our little band. I suddenly had three women in my personal entourage who might have owed more allegiance to Cel than to me. Doyle made some noises about me needing ladies in waiting, and wouldn’t it be useful if they were also trained warriors. But I knew the real reason. We took them with us because the queen might at any moment change her mind and demand them back into Cel’s service. We took them out into the snow to meet the police because they were safer with us than without us.

  CHAPTER 13

  I DIDN’T SEE THE POLICE BUT I HEARD THEM, A RUMBLE OF DEEP male voices. Sound carried so much better on those still, bitterly cold nights. My cheeks were stinging, and my breath had fogged and frozen in the fur of the hood. Barinthus had kept me warm on the walk to the faerie mounds after the assassination attempt, but I walked on my own power now. The snow was knee high for me, and my boots didn’t quite keep it from soaking into the knees of my jeans. I tried to call the feel of the summer sun to put inside my shield and help keep back the cold, but it was as if I couldn’t remember what summer felt like. The moonless night was clear with a thousand stars flung across the darkness like bits of glittering ice, diamond glints across black velvet. I focused on the fight to lift one foot, then the next, and struggle through drifts that the taller sidhe walked through effortlessly. It was undignified for a princess to fall on her face, but it took effort to keep from doing it. I suppose that struggling through the snow wasn’t exactly dignified either, but that I could do nothing about.

  But it was Biddy who stumbled. Nicca caught her before she hit the snow. I heard her apologize, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m so cold.”

  “Stop, all of you, stop,” I said. Everyone obeyed, some of them looking out at the snow, fingers near weapons.

  It was Galen who asked, “What’s wrong, Merry?”

  “Are Biddy and I the only ones here with human blood?”

  “I think so.”

  “I tried to conjure the feel of summer sun, and I couldn’t remember what it was like.”

  Doyle had worked his way back to me. “What is wrong?”

  “Check Biddy and me for a spell, a spell that attacks only human blood.”

  He pulled off one of his black gloves and put his hand just above my face, not touching skin, but searching my aura, my shielding, my magic.

  He growled low and soft, but the sound raised the hair on the back of my neck. “I take it you found something.”

  He nodded. Then he turned to Biddy, who was half fainting in Nicca’s arms. “I am sorry, Doyle. I am truly better than this.”

  “It is a spell,” he told h
er, and lifted off her helmet to lay his hand above her face. He handed the helmet to Nicca and turned to me, unable to hide the spark of angry color in his eyes. He was fighting down his power, raised by anger. Anger at himself most likely for letting yet another spell slip under his nose. We had some truly subtle spells being worked on us. One of us would have noticed something big, but such small spells were harder to guard against.

  “It is tied to mortal blood. It simply sucks at your energy, and fills you with cold.”

  “Why is Biddy more affected than Merry?” Nicca asked. He was covered completely in a thick cloak, except for his wings. They were held tight together as if they would stay warmer that way, and maybe they did. He was warm-blooded; moth wings did not change that.

  I answered him. “She’s half-human, I’m less than a fourth human. If it is seeking human blood, she’s got more than I have.”

  “Are the human police affected?” Hawthorne asked.

  Doyle put his hand back over me, and this time I felt a warm pulse of magic shiver over my shields. “It is like a contagion. It was put on either Biddy or the princess, then jumped from one to the other. If we do not remove it, it will spread to the police.”

  I looked up at him, speaking with the warmth of his magic against my skin, like breath. “What would it do to full-blooded humans?”

  “It made a warrior of the sidhe stumble in the snow. She is disoriented, and would be useless in a fight.”

  Frost was staring off into the darkness. He and another fringe of guards were all staring out into the cold night. His voice carried to me. “Is this the beginning of a more overt attack?”

  “Who would be so bold as to attack the human guards?” Amatheon wondered aloud. He’d been eager to come out into the cold, anything to be farther away from the queen, I think. But I remembered again that he had been Cel’s creature for centuries. Did a few acts of honor and kindness erase centuries of allegiance? And as close to Cel as he had been, he had to have witnessed some of the horrors the female guards spoke of, didn’t he? I made a mental note to ask him later, with Doyle and Frost at my back. Onilwyn was inside the faerie mound, because he had not recovered from the beating Maggie May and I had given him. Cold iron forces even the sidhe to heal human slow. Him I did not trust at all. Amatheon I was beginning to trust; was I wrong to trust him? Of course, the question itself meant I didn’t trust him, not really.